‘Can you spell lynching?’: lawyer’s shocking note in Texas execution case

In April 1999, John Balentine, a Black man on trial for murder in Amarillo, Texas, sat before an all-white jury as they deliberated whether he should live or die.

Should he be given a life sentence, in which case he would likely end his days behind prison bars? Or should they send him to death row to await execution?

Balentine had been convicted days earlier of murdering three white teenagers who had threatened to kill him because he was romantically engaged with one of the teenagers' white sisters - an interracial liaison widely frowned upon in heavily segregated Amarillo. Now it was the sentencing phase of the trial, when his fate would be decided.

As the trial ground towards its climax, a pair of Balentine's defense lawyers shuffled a note between themselves. "Can you spell LYNCHING?" one of them quipped in his crabby handwriting.

Before handing the note back, the second lawyer inserted a word: "Can you spell Justifiable LYNCHING?"

A facsimile of the exchange is contained among 223 pages of evidence submitted to the Texas court of criminal appeals this week as part of a last-ditch attempt to save Balentine's life. The prisoner was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection next Wednesday, and though a local court this week ordered the death warrant to be recalled on procedural grounds, the state is pressing for the judicial killing to go ahead.

Accompanying the package of new evidence, Balentine's current legal team has filed a petition which outlines the many disturbing anomalies behind his death sentence. The "justifiable lynching" note written by his own defense lawyers - which the petition decries as "unconscionable" and "stunning in its disgust for their client" - is just one example of the racial toxicity that the lawyers argue permeated the proceedings.